Acts 15 - Introduction

THE JERUSALEM COUNCIL

In the Apostolic age, as at the present day, only a minority even of the preachers, who were many, had clear and cloudless light on the pure and immaterial spirituality of the gracious economy. While the apostles, their evangelistic comrades and many others were walking in cloudless, spiritual day, they prudentially waived the prominence of all non-essential though innocent temporalities, incidentally appertaining to the visible church. While in Jerusalem they let the Jewish Christians go ahead with bloody sacrifices and everything their consciences demanded under the law of Moses, as they knew interdiction in those matters would jostle many of their Jewish converts to the Christhood of Jesus; for the same reason they utterly ignored everything appertaining to the Mosaic dispensation among the Gentiles. Consequently preachers coming down from Judea into Syria had greatly disturbed them by persistent effort to foist on them the Mosaic law. Of course, Paul and Barnabas, in the clear light of the pure spirituality of the gospel, courageously withstood these Jewish preachers, and defended the Gentile Christians against all encroachments on their free gospel rights and privileges. Consequently, the church at Antioch, the Gentile metropolis, representative of the Gentile wing of Christendom, resolved to settle the matter by sending delegates along with Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem to submit this vexed question to the apostles and elders.